Homegrown Voice AI startup Navana AI raises Rs 7 crore in a round led by Antler India

Navana.ai, a homegrown startup pioneering voice AI technology tailored to India’s linguistic diversity, has raised Rs 7 crore (about $800,000) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Antler India, with participation from noted angel investors including Ajay Agarwal, Ronnie Screwvala, and Sandeep Singhal.

The round brings Navana’s total funding to Rs 13.2 crore (approximately $1.5 million).

Founded in 2018 by brothers Raoul and Jai Nanavati, Navana.ai has emerged as a category-defining player in India’s speech AI landscape. The startup has built a proprietary AI stack that supports over a dozen Indian languages and dialects, optimised for noisy environments and low-connectivity zones where global models typically underperform.

Navana claims that its online platform currently powers voice experiences for more than 40 enterprise clients across industries such as banking, insurance, and fintech.

Its core product suite includes Bodhi Voicebot, a low-code platform for building and deploying intelligent voice agents across inbound, outbound, and app-based interfaces; Bodhi ASR, a speech recognition API purpose-built for Indian languages and dialects; and a Contact Center Intelligence API that converts large volumes of voice call data into actionable insights for fraud detection, agent performance monitoring, and automation workflows.

“From Day 1, Navana’s mission has been to democratize access to digital services for every Indian, whether in a Mumbai high-rise or a remote village in Bihar,” said Raoul Nanavati, co-founder and CEO. “Our proprietary Speech AI is fully designed, built, and deployed in India to understand the linguistic and cultural richness of Indian speech across geographies.”

The startup's infrastructure is cloud-agnostic, offering deployment options across AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as VPC and full on-premise configurations—critical for clients in regulated industries such as banking and telecom that require data residency and compliance within India.

Gowri Shankar, Associate Partner at Antler in India, said: “India is a voice-first market, and enterprises here can’t rely on global, generic models to serve their customers. Navana’s proprietary data and Indic-language voice AI stack uniquely position them to power this shift. We’ve already seen how players like Bajaj Finserv are leveraging their technology to drive meaningful business outcomes. India’s domestic Enterprise AI adoption will be a $50 billion opportunity by 2035 and we believe Navana will be at the forefront, enabling large-scale adoption of voice AI across sectors”

The funding will be used to deepen R&D in Indian-language speech models, expand product capabilities, and support go-to-market efforts.